Alzheimer's disease is a representative neurodegenerative disease accompanied by progressive dementia and loss of cognitive ability, however effective treatment method for this disease has not been found. Alzheimer's disease is obviously one of the most serious diseases in aging societies at present, and thus development of therapeutics for this disease is extremely significant from the viewpoint of medical economy.
Recently, Hashimoto et al., paid attention to the fact that there are less lesions in the occipital lobe of Alzheimer's disease patients and have cloned a gene by using the “death-trap” method (L. D'Adamio et al., Semin. Immunol., 9:17–23, 1997) from the occipital lobe that inhibits the death of nerve cells into which the causative gene of familial Alzheimer's disease is introduced (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 98: 6336–6341, 2001). This gene encodes a peptide designated “humaitin” (WO 01/21787) consisting of 24 residues. A synthetic humanin peptide not only inhibited the death of nerve cells into which the causative gene of familial Alzheimer's disease is introduced, but also the death of nerve cells induced by the addition of β amyloid which is considered to be a potential cause for Alzheimer's disease. These findings suggest that humanin or derivatives thereof might be usable as therapeutic agents for Alzheimer's disease.
Although Alzheimer's disease is a representative neurodegenerative disease accompanied by progressive dementia and loss of cognitive ability, however, effective treatment method has been not found until now.